RE: The Origins and Meaning of Doublespeak and Fake News
I read 1984 first when I was doing my last year of highschool. At the time I had become politically active, in the form of counter-propaganda against the policies that were recently introduced by the administration.
Probably it was one of the contributors to my actions, not long after, but like a whale abusing flags here, my english teacher changed my status in this new scheme so that I was compelled to attend school during exam week, even when I had no exams.
This same teacher had prior to the direct action campaign me and a friend did in retaliation for this, one day in the library we were asked as a group which book we wanted to do for our next assignment. I jumped up and down and begged to do Nineteen Eighty Four. The teacher said straight up 'no, because you asked'. Nobody else in the class had an opinion.
Then when I didn't hand in the assignment on time, he punished me with the Administration's new weapon. It may not have been that exact assignment, but one later, I forget exactly.
This guy obviously had read the book himself, so I was absolutely flabbergasted that the one time he sees me enthusiastic to actually do an assignment, he squelched the youthful exhuberance in me towards learning and expressing my opinions in writing.
It was like saying to me "We live in the world of Nineteen Eighty Four, and your interest in understanding the mechanism of control makes you the enemy of the system". I was pushed, I didn't just rebel for fun.
I think he was just trying to suppress what he saw as a rebellious attitude. You represented a crack in the dike, so to speak, so he tried to thumb you.
Pretty much, but if they ever bothered to teach teachers about human psychology and the psychology of motivation, he would not have been like that at all. The english teachers I had every year until that one, all would have not hesitated to assign this book for that assignment in this scenario.
That it came at the same time as the school was implementing a scheme that could be gamed by a teacher to suppress rebellion proved that is actually what it was intended to do.
This event was a pivotal event in my life, this period between the age of 16 and 18, and I am in some ways glad that my exuberance for learning made sure that I never considered it a failure on my part that I did not get into university to study Computer Science.
Instead I attended the University of Life, and step by step, gradually I learned all the things I needed to become who I am now, and I love who I am now.
That is an awesomely inspiring story about learning from the University of Life. I am lucky as a teacher, perhaps, in that I teach English courses for a foundation that gives me all the freedom in the world that I need to be myself, and to be honest with my students. Since about 2008, I have been warning them that they need to get real-life experience, which will be much more important in the future than a diploma.
A lot of english teachers are like this, as I mentioned, every one in the previous four years would never have done this, except the polish (or maybe he was hungarian) asshole I had in year 10, 2 years before. This teacher also triggered me to have a severe bout of bronchial asthma, which is one of the things that happens when I am stressed. The rest, they were golden.
Well, thank god your educational progress did not depend on that one bad apple.
Nope, but what did slow me down was diseases caused by the modern environments we live in. The solutions to the problems simply did not even exist until about 5 yeas ago, and it was here on Steem that someone pointed me to it, and after only a week of this prescription, I am already feeling 1000x better. From here, my life is on its way up the hockey stick tail.
Even MOAR to discuss on Tuesday, lol!